Dead Men's Money

by J. S. Fletcher

"Now then!" he said, "get the best motor car there is in the town, and be off! Make inquiries all the way along; it'll be a queer thing if you can't trace something—it would be broad daylight all the time she'd be on her journey. Make a thorough search and full inquiry—she must have been seen." He turned to Mr. Smeaton, who had stood near, listening. "Go with him!" he said. "It'll be a good turn to do him—he wants company."

Mr. Smeaton and I hurried outside the station—a car or two stood in the yard, and we picked out the best. As we got in, Chisholm came up to us.

"You'd better have a word or two with our men along the road, Mr. Hugh," said he. "There's not many between here and the part you're going to, but you'd do no harm to give them an idea of what it is you're after, and tell them to keep their eyes open—and their ears, for that matter."

"Aye, we'll do that, Chisholm," I answered. "And do you keep eyes and ears open here in Berwick! I'll give ten pounds, and cash in his hand, to the first man that gives me news; and you can let that be known as much as you like, and at once—whether Andrew Dunlop thinks it's throwing money away or not!"

And then we were off; and maybe that he might draw me away from over much apprehension, Mr. Smeaton began to ask me about the road which Maisie would take to get to the Heseltons' farm—the road which we, of course, were taking ourselves. And I explained to him that it was just the ordinary high-road that ran between Berwick and Kelso that Maisie would follow, until she came to Cornhill, where she would turn south by way of Mindrum Mill, where—if that fact had anything to do with her disappearance—she would come into a wildish stretch of country at the northern edge of the Cheviots.

"There'll be places—villages and the like—all along, I expect?" he asked.

"It's a lonely road, Mr. Smeaton," I answered. "I know it well—what places there are, are more off than on it, but there's no stretch of it that's out of what you might term human reach. And how anybody could happen aught along it of a summer's evening is beyond me!—unless indeed we're going back to the old kidnapping times. And if you knew Maisie Dunlop, you'd know that she's the sort that would put up a fight if she was interfered with! I'm wondering if this has aught to do with all yon Carstairs affair? There's been such blackness about that, and such villainy, that I wish I'd never heard the name!"

"Aye!" he answered. "I understand you. But—it's coming to an end. And in queer ways—queer ways, indeed!"

I made no reply to him—and I was sick of the Carstairs matters; it seemed to me I had been eating and drinking and living and sleeping with murder and fraud till I was choked with the thought of them. Let me only find Maisie, said I to myself, and I would wash my hands of any further to-do with the whole vile business.

But we were not to find Maisie during the long hours of that weary afternoon and the evening that followed it. Mr. Lindsey had bade me keep the car and spare no expense, and we journeyed hither and thither all round the district, seeking news and getting none. She had been seen just once, at East Ord, just outside Berwick, by a man that was working in his cottage garden by the roadside—no other tidings could we get. We searched all along the road that runs by the side of Bowmont Water, between Mindrum and the Yetholms, devoting ourselves particularly to that stretch as being the loneliest, and without result. And as the twilight came on, and both of us were dead weary, we turned homeward, myself feeling much more desperate than even I did when I was swimming for my very life in the North Sea.